


The Strange Case of the Vanished Mr Norrell

by OfShoesAndShips



Category: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell & Related Fandoms, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (TV), Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke
Genre: First Meeting, Gen, baby john has a broader accent than big john, no heirlooms were harmed in the writing of this ficlet, slightly cracky
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-28
Updated: 2019-02-28
Packaged: 2019-11-07 04:38:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17953739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OfShoesAndShips/pseuds/OfShoesAndShips
Summary: There are many ways that John Childermass might have met Mr Gilbert Norrell. This isn't one of them.





	The Strange Case of the Vanished Mr Norrell

Mr Norrell of Hurtfew Abbey was the only man in England for some several hundred years who had mastered that happy trick of leaving the house without, in fact, leaving the house. So while his carriage, his footman, his coachman, and his undistinguished man of business had left the house some two hours since in the certain knowledge that they were leaving with their master, said master was also happily ensconced by his study fire. He was deeply engrossed in a thin and startlingly modern biography, exactly the kind of thing that allowed him to ignore the shaking and rattling of the carriage that his mind was attempting to convince him was all around him.[1]

He was disturbed from his startlingly modern biography by a sharp current across the web of magic that spanned the house. Indeed he had something of the spider as he stood himself up and scuttled across the study to the door, around which he peeked. Another shake across the wards, and Mr Norrell found himself beginning to become concerned. Generally, when the wards sparked like this, it was due simply to a servant having closed a door too firmly, or a starling clocking itself against his windows. However, neither servant or starling were prone to repeating their performance. Mr Norrell thought for a moment. It seemed there may be something in the house that was not meant to be there. Shouting for one of the servants to come up from the kitchen where they spent their noontime may encourage the creature, whatever it was (Mr Norrell, you understand, was substituting ‘creature’ where you or I might instead use ‘burglar’. He had a suspicion that if he refrained from naming the thing it may just evaporate and leave him alone). Investigating alone may result in some form of injury to his person, which would result in the Mr Norrell that was travelling to Birmingham utterly evaporating. Still the creature might perhaps be in his library, and injuries to his library were even more untenable than injuries to his person.

Mr Norrell opened his study door, spared a little magic - for a moment, the left hand of the Mr Norrell who was travelling to Birmingham vanished - and stepped into the corridor. His magic had shifted the labyrinth enough that he was now only a few yards from the library, and once he reached the large double doors he pressed his ear to them and listened.

The creature was certainly a large one, but Mr Norrell still refused to name the thing even as he heard it rifling through his books and swearing - in excellent English for a creature that Mr Norrell was refusing to believe was human. This could not be borne. For something to break his wards was bad enough - he would be three days or more, fixing them, and may as well give Birmingham up for lost - but for that something to disturb his books, to put them out of order, perhaps even to _read_ them? That was so terrible it ought not be thought of.

Mr Norrell, with another little piece of magic - the left hand of the other Mr Norrell vanished for good this time - opened the library doors in silence, onto a scene of some devastation. His window was standing wide open, and a breeze flustered his curtains. The end of a candlestick was just visible poking out of a sack that also seemed to contain some more of the small sundry items that Mr Norrell kept around but had not noticed for some fifteen years. The indignation that filled him at this, however, was nothing to the indignation that struck him when his eyes met those of a dishevelled young creature that was sitting in his chair, a book in his lap. Not an especially good book, either - Munday’s, if Mr Norrell was not mistaken.[2]

The young creature had long hair, which apparently he could not have been bothered to tie up; he had not bothered with neckcloth or waistcoat, either, but sat there in a tired black coat and breeches, with half his neck on display above the collar of his shirt. The collar may have had blood on it; Norrell was too far away to tell, but some of those stains seemed suspect. The eyes that met Norrell’s - that had not dropped, in all these few moments - were dark and hard, as if Norrell were the intruder disturbing _his_ reading.

“Excuse me,” Norrell said, at a loss for how one spoke to burglars who were half a foot taller than one and probably much more accustomed to getting their own way.

“Tha’s supposed to be on tha way to Birmingham,” said the young man, in a tone that caused Norrell to flinch back and feel suddenly rather anxious about things other than the man in his chair. Somewhere inside Mr Norrell there was a schoolboy who had been caught in the stables doing all manner of things that Mr Norrell the schoolboy had never actually done.

“I,” he said, and stopped.

“Aye?”

“You are not supposed to be in my house. You are not supposed to be able to get into my house.”

Finally the man closed the Munday and put it aside, which caused Mr Norrell to relax slightly. He did not, however, answer.

“How did you break my wards?” Mr Norrell asked, annoyed enough now to be forthright.

The man stood and Mr Norrell regretted it immediately, convinced the man were about to rush at him and attack him. Yet the man’s face, when Mr Norrell saw it again, was curious. The slightest corner of his mouth crept, slowly and just a little too far, up the side of his face. “Were easy,” he said, shrugging his shoulders, “You’ve a weak spot in front’t window.”

Mr Norrell’s anxiety all but drained away, and was replaced by a confused indignation.

“You can sense magic?”

The man laughed a little, a rough thing that spoke of pipesmoke and all the corners of Yorkshire in which Mr Norrell had never set foot. He turned away and picked up the sack, hefting it onto his shoulder.

“Seems like it,” he said, looking over his shoulder at Mr Norrell.

Mr Norrell stood in startled silence as the young man ducked out of the window. As he began to disappear out into the foggy morning, Mr Norrell started forwards.

“I can pay you eight pounds a year,” he said, only just loud enough to be heard over the low shifting and clacking of various heirlooms in an old haysack.

The heirlooms suddenly became extremely loud as they dropped two stories, and the man’s head reappeared in the window.

“What was that?”

Mr Norrell pursed his lips. “I cannot have a civil conversation with a man dangling out of my window.”

“I’m on a ladder,” the man said, but slunk himself up and back through the window anyway. He stood on Norrell’s low windowsill as if ready to flee at any point if what Mr Norrell said did not agree with him.

“My current man of business cannot sense magic.”

That smile, or what passed for one, crept up the side of that sharp face.

Norrell paused. He had expected something to follow this very clear job offer.

“I have a job,” the man said, eventually.

“Working for me is unlikely to get you hanged.”

The man tipped his head; his mouth shifted as though he was not quite sure that was the case, “Seeing you, it might.”

“I am a most respectable magician-” Mr Norrell started.

“Respectable magicians do not hire men like me. At least, not for respectable matters.”

“You know magic.”

The man looked at Mr Norrell for a moment, and then stepped off the windowsill. He turned and closed the window.

“Appen I want to finish that book.”

“It would be a waste of your time. It was a waste of Munday’s time.”

The window latch closed with a snap. Mr Norrell found himself wondering how the man had opened it to start with.

The man turned. He seemed to shift; some sense of something lithe and slippery fell away from him, and he folded his arms behind his back.

“John Childermass,” he said, “At your service.”

 

 

[1] Cole’s 1570 memoir of his famous magician acquaintance, who he did not have the foresight to name. Mr Norrell believed this memoir to be mostly fiction, but its dry analysis of various acts of magic meant that it was the only type of fiction likely to satisfy his taste. He considered it in the same kind of vein as you or I may consider the latest work by the Messers Bell - that is, as melodramatic ‘fluff’ he would not confess to liking in polite society.

 

[2]  The Mr Norrell who was on his way to Birmingham, at this point, vanished, a fact that was only discovered when the coachman got peckish on the Lancashire border


End file.
